Wearable Pneumatic Soft Physiotherapy Device for Shoulder and Neck Acupoint Massage

Abstract

The high reliance on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) knowledge and practical skills has led to prolonged training cycles for therapists and a significant talent shortage, posing a severe challenge to the standardization of TCM physiotherapy in rehabilitation. Meanwhile, most physiotherapy robots based on rigid robotics technology suffer from insufficient safety and adaptability, resulting in unsatisfactory treatment effects. This paper presents a novel wearable pneumatic soft physiotherapy device, designed to achieve high-safety and personalized physiotherapy for shoulder and neck acupoint massage. The device integrates four soft massage actuators, four embedded thin-film stress sensors, two miniature airflow sources, and a power supply system, enhancing its portability. Additionally, a hybrid control strategy combining feedforward inverse compensation and PID feedback is proposed to regulate and customize the therapy intensity on human acupoints. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed device can apply therapeutic intensities ranging from 0 to 3.45 N to human acupoints, effectively adapting to the human shoulder and neck region to achieve good wearing comfort, and performing safe acupoint massage with customized physiotherapy intensities. This study explores and realizes the integration of emerging soft robotics technology with TCM, providing a paradigm for the development of more soft physiotherapy devices.